Why CheapOair Is Sticking With Flights While Booking Peers Chase Hotels
Photo Credit: CheapOair founder and CEO Sam Jain says the company unabashedly addresses the market for flights, and believes there is a huge upside to doing air right. In the photo, Jain speaks at a company holiday party in 2010. CheapOair
Skift Take
CheapOair has already proven that it can make a viable business out of flights when its competitors are scurrying to build their hotel businesses. There will be pressures, and it won't be the fastest-growing business in the world, but there is plenty of room for companies like CheapOair that keep their heads down and focus on areas that others are neglecting.
Most online travel businesses are trying to diversify away from the flight business as fast as they can, treating airline tickets almost as a loss leader. In fact, even flight-shopping site Skyscanner recently acquired a hotel-search business.
Then there's New York City-based CheapOair, and founder and CEO Sam Jain, who wants to do for flights what Booking.com did for hotels.
Jain outlined CheapOair's strategy and ambitions exclusively to Skift in one of the few press interviews he's given since CheapOair was founded in 2005.
OK, Jain has no illusions that CheapOair can achieve success on the scale that Booking.com has done, but he sees a huge upside in the fact that "airlines are craving to differentiate themselves."
In that regard, representatives from Etihad Airways spent several days in CheapOair's Manhattan office last week, awarding prizes to contact center agents who correctly answered questions about the meal choices in first class, for example. Emirates and Singa
